The light did not fade so much as it rewound.
Rehan felt himself falling — through fractured atmosphere, through the last dying warmth of a broken planet — and then falling stopped meaning anything at all. The void around him dissolved into something softer. Warmer. A ceiling fan, spinning lazily. Sunlight through cheap classroom blinds. The smell of chalk dust and instant noodles from the tiffin box under his desk.
He was seventeen years old again.
"Oi, Rehan! Wake up, sir's coming!"
A hand smacked the back of his head — not hard, just enough to startle him upright from where he'd been dozing against his folded arms. He blinked at the world around him: rows of wooden desks, a ceiling fan wobbling on its axis, forty other students in the same faded blue uniform, none of them radiant with golden-emerald fire, none of them carrying the weight of dead gods on their shoulders.
None of them knowing what was coming.
"Joshi," Rehan mumbled, rubbing his eyes, "why do you always hit so hard for someone who claims to like me."
Sitting beside him, twin braids swinging as she turned to smirk at him, was a girl with an easy laugh and ink-stained fingers from a physics notebook she never quite finished on time. Joshi. Ordinary, in every way that mattered back then — no divine authority, no cosmic bloodline, just a stubborn, warm, endlessly teasing girl who had somehow decided, months ago, that a quiet, unremarkable boy named Rehan was worth choosing.
"Because you never wake up otherwise," she said, flicking a folded paper note onto his desk. "Read it after class. And don't make that face — it's not a love letter, it's notes for the chem test you definitely didn't study for."
He hadn't studied for it. He never seemed to have time — not because of gods or void-demons or shattered dimensions, but because his father worked two jobs and his mother's hospital bills didn't pay themselves, and somewhere between tuition and part-time delivery shifts, physics homework simply lost the fight for his attention.
Joshi never once made him feel small for it.
That was the thing about her he would spend the next several years of his life — divine and mortal both — failing to properly explain to anyone. She didn't love him because he was destined for anything. She loved him back when he was destined for nothing at all. Back when the only sky he carried was the one over a two-room flat with a leaking roof.
"After school," she said, gathering her books as the bell rang, "meet me at the old temple steps. I want to show you something. I've been... feeling weird lately. Like there's something under my skin trying to get out."
Rehan frowned, but she was already laughing again, already halfway out the door, sunlight catching gold in strands of her dark hair in a way that felt, in memory, almost like a warning nobody had known to read yet.
He didn't know — couldn't have known — that somewhere deep inside her, dormant since birth, coiled tight and waiting, an ancient scarlet authority had just begun, quietly, irreversibly, to stir awake.
He followed her out into the afternoon sun anyway, seventeen and unremarkable and happy, with no idea that he was walking toward the last ordinary day of his entire life.